For the record, most magicians consider Crazy Cube a much better trick than the Hot Rod. Crazy Cube depends on a diabolical method that sails right past everyone who doesn’t know it. The Hot Rod is by far the most popular “paddle” trick out there but unlike most it also depends on an additional method so terrible and transparent magicians openly and derisively refer to it as “the Hot Rod Force.”

There are much better paddle tricks that give you beautiful visual changes without that goofy selection process. With Hot Rod, the change is great but how you get there…ooo la la.

On the other hand, for what is essentially a mass-produced cheap plastic trick Crazy Cube is startlingly great. I demoed it hundreds of times during my magic shop days and never once had anyone figure anything out.

Wait a minute… he didn’t really saw that woman in half at all. That guy is a PHONY!

I prefer magic tricks to involve a non-zero value of skill to pull off, instead of “Herp derp, I could see the die through the plastic, even though I said I couldn’t! It took me years to master the skill of having working eyeballs to pull off this amazing feat!”

I prefer magic tricks to involve a non-zero value of skill to pull off

For anything other than slight of hand or psychological tricks, there are a surprisingly small number of magic tricks that would really top that bar. Most of the difficulty in magic is in the presentation, the majority of tricks are dead simple once you know the method that was used. That generally goes double for any trick that involves learning information about something that’s supposedly hidden from the magician.

I prefer magic tricks to involve a non-zero value of skill to pull off,

I understand what you’re saying, but something tells me this trick, like pretty much all magic tricks, is way harder in practice to pull off than it seems. You can’t be obvious about it, for example, and there’s lots of distraction going on. I couldn’t tell how he did it until I read the explanation, and that takes some serious skill.

Granted not quite as much skill as locking yourself in a straight jacket and being tossed to the bottom of the bay, but still.

I know it’s not directly related to the Crazy Cube, but as far as mind-reading goes I feel like I have to share the trick I learned from The Unpleasant World of Penn and Teller where you force the top card of a deck. I practiced over and over to make sure that I could even shuffle without disrupting that first card. When my family finally reunited for the holidays and were sitting around for some binge-watching, I pulled out the deck, warned them of my “potential failure” and gave it a riff.
“Six? So you would draw one, two, three, four, five and six. The sixth card is your card so you just–”
“Well you have to shuffle it again now, right?”
Damnit. Damnit, damnit, damnit, damnit, we weren’t prepared for this. Okay, we can do it. One more shuffle, one more pull.
“Your card was the… mmmm… aaaaah… THREE OF CLUBS!”
“Uh, no!”
My brother tears off his shirt, revealing the ace of hearts drawn on his chest.
“Hahaha! What, no!”
I castigate myself for my terrible trick, swearing that I thought I had practiced it enough. No, don’t tell me the card I don’t even want to know how badly I messed it up. Just put the show back on. Five minutes into our latest episode the video suddenly cuts off and we’re looking at my brother’s girlfriend standing off in a distant sidewalk. Slowly, excruciatingly so, she walks towards the camera as my parents and siblings freak out about what’s going on.
“Is this your card?”
And for one brief moment, I was Harry freaking Houdini.
My point here is that it’s not a matter of how stupid a trick is, it’s how well you present it. Just please only do it in supermarkets when the context is appropriate.

And is the trick to the Hot Rod for 1 and 6 really spelling them out? Because that just seems like punching someone in the face and screaming “NO YOU DREW AN ACE OF SPADES!”